Tinbox shifter, Michael Dell has confirmed that the has no intention to asset strip EMC and flog off small bits of it.

Reuters had reported that the company could sell off $10bn of assets to reduce the $49.5bn of debt it will be taking on to fund the acquisition.

Logically this would mean Perot Systems, Dell’s own service arm, acquired for $3.9bn in 2009, Quest, which it bought for $2.7bn in 2012; and SonicWall, which it reportedly acquired in 2012 for $1.2bn would be logical sales. Dell’s Equalogic service must also be in doubt given that it overlaps with EMC’s SAN portfolio.

However Dell appeared to deny this.

When asked if he would sell off EMC assets where there was found to be comparable Dell products, Dell said:

“The portfolios of products are highly complementary. There are some overlaps in storage, but Dell product lines and EMC storage product lines are somewhat different. We are going from seven to nine [product lines], which is not a problem, and we’ll continue to enhance them.”

Of course he was not talking about VMware. Dell confirmed that the company has no plans to tie in VMware with Dell.

“We believe in choice and openness. VMware will remain an independent public company. We are not going to disadvantage VMware partners in respect to their relationship with VMware,” he said.

Tin-box shifter Michael Dell mocked the prophecy of the Grand mufti of the Apple Cargo cult, Tim Cook who insisted that the PC was on its way out.

Cook hit the headlines this week claiming that people were going to reject PCs in favour of tablets. His words echoed those of his predecessor, Steve Jobs, who in 2010 proclaimed that the “post-PC era” had arrived.

Dell, who has been making computers since the early 1980s, the era of the PC is far from over.

“The post-PC era has been great for the PC. When the post-PC era started there were about 180m PCs being sold a year and now it’s up to over 300m, so I like the post-PC era,” he said.

“For the last 11 quarters in a row, we’ve been gaining share in PCs. Last year we outgrew HP and Lenovo. It’s a business with an installed base of 1.8bn PCs, 600m of them are more than four years old, and as we create new beautiful, thin, powerful PCs that are better than the thing you bought five years ago, people will replace the old ones. And we are getting more and more share of that opportunity each quarter that goes by.”

He admitted that the market was changing rapidly and PCs have to compete for attention with a multitude of other devices which rely on the cloud.

The largest U.S. shareholder advisory firm has recommended on Monday that Dell stockholders vote in favour of Chief Executive Michael Dell's $24.4 billion buyout offer.

Institutional Shareholder Services is listened to by a lot of shareholders so it means the deal is more likely to defeat billionaire investor Carl Icahn's rival bid. Dell shareholders are scheduled to vote on the offer July 18. Several large investors have been pushing for improved terms. But it looks like the ISS seal of approval makes the Silver Lake/Michael Dell deal more likely to receive shareholder approval.

Institutional Shareholder Services is the biggest shareholder advisory firm, and its recommendations can sway investors looking for direction, which is most of them. ISS said Michael Dell's offer "transfers the risk of the deteriorating PC business and the company's ongoing business transformation to the buyout group."

Tinbox maker Dell is experimenting with servers that use Arm chips but is finding that the software is not up to scratch.

According to PC World the architecture faces software issues that could stop it from being a viable alternative to x86. At the request of some of its bigger clients, Dell has been testing a few low-power servers with ARM processors, which have interesting attributes related to power and density in data centres.

Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of server platforms for Dell was quoted as saying he had major concerns about the weak software ecosystem surrounding ARM. He said that there are lots of advantages from the architecture even if it means porting your code over to that new instruction set and maintaining two different software stacks. But he said that there are time and cost issues associated with porting software from x86 to ARM.

Dell has a good sense of what the ARM ecosystem will look like for the next 12 to 18 months and has a cunning plan to release ARM-based servers.